BOSTON—This series was supposed to go seven games. Everything about it said that it was going seven games. With a minute and a half to go in Game 6, it was going seven games. The Stanley Cup was in the building tonight, but we weren't going to actually see it tonight.

Last year in Los Angeles was my first time on the ice for the Stanley Cup celebration, and even after a game and a series that were nowhere near in doubt, it was pandemonium and insanity, a sea of happy hockey players, happy families, happy friends, scrambling reporters, and happy hockey executives.

This was just nuts, because nobody could really believe what had happened. Michal Rozsival, a Stanley Cup winner for the first time, still did not know who had scored the two goals that made him a Stanley Cup winner for the first time after the Blackhawks had turned a 2-1 deficit into a 3-2 victory.

Jamal Mayers also became a champion for the first time, even though he did not play in a single playoff game for Chicago. The veteran center was one of the Blackhawks' team leaders nonetheless, a respected presence in the locker room, and one of the first to skate with the Cup after captain Jonathan Toews accepted it from Gary Bettman.

Mayers wasn't in uniform for the game, but he and the other healthy scratches all were in full uniform, including pads, on the ice. They had to scramble to suit up, and Mayers pointed to his socks, and how he hand't taped them up.

"Gotta look authentic," Mayers said. "I did have a nightmare that the trainers forgot my jersey, so I made them check when we first landed and got to the rink."

There was Andrew Shaw, still bleeding from the stitches on his face that didn't hold together after he took a puck under the eye in the first period, and there was Brandon Saad on a cell phone, and there was Duncan Keith with his family, and there was Viktor Stalberg, on one knee, and there was a tall blonde woman jumping into his arms and kissing him, and you'd think they had just gotten engaged. You might even tweet about that if you saw it on the ice, and then ask Stalberg if he had played the entire game carrying the ring.

"Oh, no, I don't have a ring," Stalberg said with a laugh. "No, no, no, nothing like that. She was just happy for the game. No, no, we've got a ways to go before that."

Stalberg will get a championship ring soon enough. The Blackhawks will go home and celebrate some more, and maybe at some point it will seem real that they don't have to play Game 7, that Game 6 really ended like it did, in a blur, before another blur on the ice.